Inhabiting the Web

Goal

The project will examine a VR conferencing system (MASSIVE). Meetings will be held within MASSIVE between the different sites involved in the project, and we aim to evaluate both the networking and usability requirements through a series of experiments.

Status

Support

Funding:

BT/JISC

Partners:

The project will be carried out by a consortium of five universities, all SuperJANET sites, and British Telecom Laboratories.

Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester and UCL are all primary SuperJANET sites and will be able to run the experimental application over both ATM and SMDS. Lancaster will initially utilise SMDS only, but may move to ATM later.

Tasks

10/07/96: Lost at Sea Task
16/07/96: Henry Normal search and construct task
31/07/96: Find the letters and get confused
14/08/96: Match the file/star, book/author - think of words
21/08/96: Jumbled Cities - Odd Man Out - Random Words - Maze
04/09/96: Solve the problem and exit the maze
18/09/96: Using focus with noisy objects
25/09/96: The Air Balloon - Advice - The Memory Game
02/10/96: End of trials party
Solutions to the Tasks

Links

The following are links to related pages:

Project Documentation

Associated Events

Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Environments in Higher Education

Related Projects

The project will draw on, and help integrate results from, a number of other projects including:

Virtuosi: examining virtual organisations, funded under the DTI/EPSRC CSCW programme. (BT, Nottingham and Lancaster)
Comic: recently finished ESPRIT Basic Research Action. (Nottingham and Lancaster)
DEVRL: EPSRC funded Distributed Extensible Virtual Reality Laboratory (Nottingham, Lancaster and UCL)
Virtual Science Park: project at Leeds University.
Aviary: project at Manchester.

Enabling Systems

MASSIVE

Publications

A list of publications which may be of interest to those interested in the ITW project.

MASSIVE-1

This paper overviews the MASSIVE-1 system, detailing the design and implementation.: Greenhalgh, C. M., and Benford, S. D. (1995): "MASSIVE: A Virtual Reality System for Tele-conferencing", ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interfaces (TOCHI), 2 (3), pp. 239-261, ISSN 1073-0516, ACM Press, September 1995. ftp://ftp.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/pub/papers/TOCHI95.ps.gz
This paper presents an analysis of network and application data collected from the ITW trials.: Greenhalgh, C. (1997): "Analysing movement and world transitions in virtual reality tele-conferencing", To be presented at the 5th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW'97), 7-11 September 1997, Lancaster, UK. ftp://ftp.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/pub/papers/ECSCW97movement.ps.gz

MASSIVE-2

This paper introduces regions into MASSIVE-2 and presents a crowds application.: Benford, S., Greenhalgh, C., Lloyd, D. (1997): "Crowded Collaborative Virtual Environments", to be presented at ACM CHI'97.
pages 1-7: ftp://ftp.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/pub/papers/CHI97a.ps.gz
page 8 (colour plates): ftp://ftp.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/pub/papers/CHI97b.ps.gz
An overview of the MASSIVE-2 model.: Greenhalgh, C. (1996): "Dynamic, embodied multicast groups in MASSIVE-2", Technical Report NOTTCS-TR-96-8, Department of Computer Science, The University of Nottingham, UK.
ftp://ftp.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/pub/papers/NOTTCS-TR-96-8.ps.gz
An example of MASSIVE-2 in use at a public poetry performance which took place in Nottingham in November 1996.: Benford, S., Greenhalgh, C., Snowdon, D., Bullock, A. (1997): "Staging a Public Poetry Performance in a Collaborative Virtual Environment", Internal Report. ftp://ftp.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/pub/papers/CRG97-poetry.ps.gz

Embodiment

This paper considers some issues surrounding user embodiments.: Benford, S. D., Bowers, J. M., Fahlen, L. E., Greenhalgh, C. M. and Snowdon, D. N. (1995): "User Embodiment in Collaborative Virtual Environments", Proc. 1995 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'95), May 7-11, Denver, Colorado, USA, ACM Press.
ftp://ftp.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/pub/papers/CHI95.ps.gz
This paper relates some results from the Inhabiting the WEB evaluations.: Tromp, J. & Snowdon, D. (1997) "Virtual Body Language: Providing appropriate user interfaces in collaborative virtual environments". in Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology 1997 (VRST'97) September 15 - 17, 1997, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.